Features
In Australia, as in Canada, Jews Are on Their Own
By HENRY SREBRNIK Australia and Canada share many similarities, and so do their Jewish communities. Most Jews live in two large cities, in Australia’s case, Melbourne and Sydney. And they have been well off and integrated into society. Yet in both countries, there has been an unprecedented rise in antisemitism.
I would submit that a majority of Australians and Canadians have now lost sympathy for Israel. It doesn’t matter if what they hear about Israel being engaged in genocide in Gaza is true or not, nor even if they don’t believe all or most of it. The bottom line is that they see Israel as engaging in war crimes. (As for Americans, a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University between Aug. 21 and 25 found that half of voters – and 77 per cent of the Democrats among them — believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide.)
On July 29, a national poll in Australia delivered a deeply unsettling message. The survey revealed that just 24 per cent of Australians hold a positive view of Jews, while 28 per cent express negative views, and the rest are indifferent or unsure. I’m guessing Canadian numbers wouldn’t be all that different.
And this comes after two years of unrelenting escalation, during which antisemitic incidents in Australia and Canada have surged by over 300 per cent. Synagogues have been vandalized, and Jewish businesses attacked. Marches have featured chants glorifying terror and calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state.
On August 3, tens of thousands of Australians marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge under the banner “March for Humanity — Save Gaza.” Among them were former foreign minister Bob Carr, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore. Australians took to the streets again three weeks later to advocate for Palestinians. A man at the very front of that first procession held aloft a portrait of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Such symbolism has become even more disturbing in light of recent revelations. On August 26, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, along with Mike Burgess, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), confirmed that Iran directed the arson attacks against Lewis’ Continental Kitchen, a Jewish-owned business in Sydney, last October, and the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne two months later. Yet even this disclosure will change little.
In fact, Australia denied entry to Israeli parliamentarian Simcha Rothman ahead of a planned solidarity visit with the country’s Jewish community. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke justified the move by claiming Rothman was coming “to spread a message of hate and division.” Rothman, chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, had been scheduled to meet with victims of antisemitism, visit Jewish institutions and address Jewish schools and synagogues.
Readers know that Canada is no better. Within days of the October 7, 2023 pogrom, pro-Hamas protesters were emboldened by inaction on the part of authorities and police forces. What followed has been months of harassment, intimidation and open antisemitism, at levels not seen here in more than 80 years.
Liberal MP Anthony Housefather last month issued a call to action amid growing antisemitism across Canada, co-signed by 31 of his Liberal colleagues. Citing Statistic Canada data on police-reported hate crimes, he pointed out that while Jews make up only one per cent of Canada’s population, they are the victims of 70 per cent of reported religious-based acts of hate.
All but six of the signatories were MPs from Ontario or Quebec. But why did the other 137 members of the Liberal caucus not sign on? “Why is fighting antisemitism seemingly determined by constituency demographics,” University of Ottawa Law Professor Michael Geist asked in a comment posted on X.
As Geist also noted in “There is a Growing List of Unsafe Places for the Jewish Community in Canada,” an August 29 article in the Globe and Mail, the rise of antisemitism in this country “has too often been met with inaction and generic statements against all forms of hate, or assurances that this behaviour wasn’t reflective of Canadian values. As politicians remain silent and law enforcement stays on the sidelines, the language becomes more violent in nature amidst allegations of criminality directed at an entire community. The cumulative effect is the gradual erasure of a visible Jewish presence in Canada.”
For the past two years, we’ve watched the unthinkable become normalized, and still, the silence has persisted. We believed that behind the chaos of social media and the radicalism of campus protests, there was a steady, principled middle who would never let hate take hold. But we were wrong. Many condemnations were merely lip service. Institutional policies were rarely enforced. And while we heard reassurances from officials that “this is not who we are,” perhaps it’s exactly who “we” are.
So why did we believe? Because the alternative is that the “silent majority” doesn’t exist and that antisemitism is being tolerated. It means that when politicians like Albanese or Mark Carney announce they will recognize a Palestinian state that has no defined borders, a non-functioning and certainly non-democratic government, while Hamas still holds hostages and preaches genocide, they are not defying their supporters but catering to them. Albanese later told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that his decision was partly motivated by a phone call with Benjamin Netanyahu that made it clear that the Israeli prime minister was “in denial” about the situation in Gaza.
The pleas of Australia’s and Canada’s Jews to reconsider this absurd move fell on deaf ears. It means that we are not surrounded by quiet allies, but by people who don’t care. When attacks on Jewish gatherings or buildings take place, most non-Jews, even if they don’t approve, are unlikely to be very angry or upset about it. We “deserve” it, in their view, by supporting a nation committing crimes and mass murder.
This requires a complete change in our psychological mindset regarding our place in society. From the 1950s until recently, the “default mode” that we assumed to be true was that most people, save some antisemites here and there, were fine with us as members of the larger community, and deserving of respect and protection. They didn’t have to be our “friends” to feel that way.
No longer. We can’t continue to be “shocked” when the leaders of the world, even countries like ours and Australia, no longer have any particular interest in our welfare (as is demonstrated day after day in news stories). And it’s not just because our enemies have greater domestic electoral clout. It’s just easier for most people to distance themselves from us quietly – which is not that hard to do for those, including most politicians, who have never moved much in circles where they’d be close to Jews.
We are on our own, and this will require a psychological adjustment. It doesn’t mean most people are now antisemites or supporters of Hamas or Islamists. But they will not particularly care to support us. We are now associated with a country they see in a very negative light, one many consider even worse than China or – yes! – Putin’s Russia. Only those people with genuine historical or religious knowledge, clearly a minority, will understand our plight. We must get used to this new reality.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
In Dan Brown’s chaotic tale of a rampaging Golem, a case of missing Judaism
By Mira Fox September 27, 2025
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
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Strap on your best smooth-soled Italian loafers and get ready to spring over some cobblestones, because Robert Langdon — everyone’s favorite tweed-jacketed, baritone-voiced, handsome Harvard “symbologist” — is back, and he’s racing through the streets of Prague.
In Dan Brown’s newest thriller, however, there’s no Dante or Mary Magdalene; Brown is finally veering away from the Christian mythos that drove all of his previous adventures such as The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons. This time, he’s taking on something older and far more mysterious: Judaism.
Each of Brown’s symbology books has a central guiding myth or story, i.e. the Holy Grail, Dante’s Inferno or the Founding Fathers’ involvement with Freemasonry. The Secret of Secrets follows the same formula, and its opening moments make its central myth obvious. Within the first few pages of the book, the Golem of Prague — which for some reason Brown insists on spelling as Golěm — has already murdered someone.
The story proceeds about as you’d expect, if you’ve read any of the previous Robert Langdon novels; though it has been eight years since we last read about the Harvard professor’s misadventures, he remains dashing and impressively fit for his age, as Brown reminds us regularly, though this time we hear less about his penchant for tweed. Langdon still has a photographic memory, which still comes in handy as he deciphers various codes, and the book is still loaded with long tangents about the history of various buildings and artifacts that Langdon is sprinting by. (Even while desperately attempting to escape from a gunman in a historic library, the symbologist has the presence of mind to consider the artist behind the frescoes on the ceiling.)
But the book is notably lacking in something surprising: the Jewish history of Prague, or of the Golem, or blood libel. There are no Hebrew translations or reinterpretations of Talmudic texts. We don’t learn some little known midrash that holds a secretive double meaning. These are the kinds of factoids that usually drive Brown’s mysteries, yet they’re absent.
The plot revolves, instead, around a damsel in distress, who readers may remember from the previous Langdon books: The beautiful “noetic scientist” Katherine Solomon, who is about to publish an academic treatise detailing her research on human consciousness and death. Apparently some very powerful people want to destroy her manuscript, so the action and mystery unfold across Prague as Langdon attempts to save Katherine, save her book, and — hey why not — save all of Prague and also maybe the United States. And, somewhere in there, a Golem is on the loose.
Brown’s previous novels have delved into various Christian mysteries with vigor and palpable fascination; whatever Brown’s many foibles as a writer, you could tell that he was excited by the myth of the Holy Grail, which took centerstage in The DaVinci Code, which he reinterpreted to be an allegory about a love affair between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In Angels and Demons, Brown has great fun with the secretive inner workings of the Vatican, and Inferno is laden with delighted diversions into Christian history and ideas about the afterlife, courtesy of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.
In The Secret of Secrets, Brown outlines the basic myth of the Golem: Rabbi Judah Loew, a 16th century Talmudic scholar and leader of Prague’s Jewish community, created a magic guardian out of clay to protect the ghetto from antisemitic attacks. Loew engraved the word “emet,” or truth, in Hebrew on its forehead to bring it to life. Eventually the Golem turned on the rabbi, almost killing him, until Loew managed to rub away the aleph in “emet,” turning the word to “met,” or death, and stopping the creature; its body was placed in an attic in case it was needed again.
That’s about all we get, yet there’s so much more to explore. In another version of the story, Loew made sure to erase the aleph from the Golem’s forehead every Shabbat to allow it to rest; instead of going on a murderous rampage, the creature was eventually destroyed because it desecrated the holy day. According to some stories, a Nazi tried to ransack the attic where the Golem was stored, and died mysteriously. Others say its body was stowed in a genizah, where sacred Jewish texts are placed since they cannot be destroyed.
Then there is the actual Jewish history, the blood libel, accusations of witchcraft and antisemitic laws that kept Jews segregated in Prague’s ghetto. There is also Loew’s own life as a lauded Talmudic scholar — not a Kabbalist, as Brown describes him — and, of course, a rich tradition of Talmudic and midrashic exegesis. The setting is rife with the kind of symbols and mystery that Brown uses as fodder in all his other thrillers, inventing secret societies and mystical artifacts lost to history.
Instead, The Secret of Secrets has no Jewish characters and very little Jewish history. Though Brown sprinkles in a few of Prague’s Jewish landmarks — the Old-New Synagogue and the city’s historic Jewish cemetery — the book still manages, despite its Golem centerpiece, to spend most of its time in churches. When Langdon first encounters the Golem and sees its forehead inscription, Brown notes that the symbologist “did not read Hebrew well,” though the professor, who specializes in religion, regularly relies on his fluency in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic and even a fake angelic language invented by two crackpot mediums that was never spoken by more than a handful of people. At one point, the Golem is described as arriving “like some kind of ascendant Christ.”
The real focus of the book is an imaginary bit of science having to do with human consciousness and life after death, a topic Brown has been exploring in the Langdon books for some time now. His interest in religion seems to stem from the idea that they are all, fundamentally, the same, and that all religions are reaching for proof that life persists after death.
But Judaism doesn’t. There are concepts — which Brown overemphasizes — like gilgul or gehenna that imply some post-death experience, but they’re not central to Jewish thought. Though one of the characters reads Loew’s most famous text, Brown clearly didn’t. (Like most works of Jewish commentary, it’s hardly the kind of work one buys in a bookstore and reads in a sitting.)
It’s not as though Brown’s previous books got everything, or even most things, right about Christianity. His wacky inventions are part of the fun — no one is reading a thriller about a fictional professor of an imaginary discipline for accuracy. The Golem is a myth, a rich story that has remained resonant over the centuries due to its flexibility and ability to be reinterpreted; Brown can make whatever he wants of it. The problem is that he has made so little.
Mira Fox is a reporter at the Forward. Get in touch at fox@forward.com or on Twitter @miraefox.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
Top Free Slot Demos You Can Play Right Now
Sometimes, you might not want to pay for spinning reels. Maybe you just don’t have cash at the moment, or you want to just play for fun without any responsibilities. And that’s totally normal. Free slot demos are there for you. If you’re looking for some great options to play right now, here are the top free slot demos that are worth checking out.
Free slot demos that bring the fun
Sweet Bonanza
Fans’ favorite Sweet Bonanza demo play offers a candy-themed slot. Instead of traditional paylines, it uses a 6×5 grid where wins happen when you land eight or more matching symbols anywhere on the screen. Every win triggers the tumble feature. It means that winning symbols disappear, and new ones drop in. Potentially, they chain multiple wins together.
The highlight, though, is the free spins round. If you land four or more lollipop scatters, you’ll get 10 free spins. They’d be complete with colorful multiplier bombs that can reach up to 100x. Since the game is known for high volatility, demo mode is a nice way to test whether you enjoy the thrill of chasing those big but less frequent wins. Plus, the candy graphics and upbeat soundtrack make the whole experience surprisingly addictive.
Big Bass Bonanza
If you prefer fishing rods to candy canes, Big Bass Bonanza is another top demo slot you should try. It’s simple and fun. It has a free spins feature where the fisherman collects money values that are attached to fish symbols. As you progress through levels, multipliers increase. And it gives you a shot at some impressive wins. The demo version is a great way to see how often the fisherman shows up and whether this type of slot is what you might like.
Cleocatra
Cleocatra slots are about ancient Egypt with adorable cats. As fun as it sounds, it somehow works. The base game features wild multipliers. However, the free spins round is what makes it truly interesting. Sticky wilds lock in place and can quickly build up some wild combinations. In demo mode, you’ll get to see how powerful those sticky wilds can be without risking any cash.
Boom!
Among the slots that are packed with features, Boom! is worth a spin in demo. This game offers expanding wilds, free spins, jackpots, and even multiple bonus games. It might not be the greatest choice if you’re new to slots. There are just so many different things that it might feel overwhelming. Well, it’s free. So, even if you want to try, there’s nothing to be afraid of. That’s exactly why demo play is so useful. You can try out each feature and figure out whether you like the layered gameplay.
Sweet Bonanza 1000
Yes, Sweet Bonanza deserves two mentions. The newer Sweet Bonanza 1000 takes the original formula and cranks up the intensity. There are bigger multipliers, higher max wins, and even more fun. It makes this version perfect for people who just want extra adrenaline. Why should you try it? You can actually see if the higher risk is what you can go after. It’s more volatile than the original. That’s why trying the demo play is a wise choice.
Why play free demos?
Of course, the feeling is completely different from playing for real money. However, there are people who enjoy slots not because of the potential winnings. Here are some other reasons to pay attention to them:
- You can get the full slot experience without spending anything at all;
- You can actually figure out the bonus trigger, scatter, and volatility;
- You can see how bonus buys, multipliers, and jackpots actually play out;
- You can choose if you like slow and steady play or big swings.
Final thoughts
With the option to play free slot demos, you can try popular titles like Sweet Bonanza without any risks. Surely, they can help you just kill the time. However, they can also let you figure out the mechanics and test features. There are lots of them, and you can test them all. After that, you can decide you’re up to bet real money.
Features
New movie, “Bau, Artist at War,” now playing in Winnipeg, tells the amazing story of Joseph Bau, whose marriage to his wife Rebecca was made famous in “Schindler’s List”
“They can starve us, beat us, cage us – but they could never kill our spirit.“ – Joseph Bau
A gripping new movie, titled Bau, Artist at War, is now on at the Cineplex Odeon McGillivray Theatre.
The movie tells the story of Joseph Bau, whose dramatization of his marriage in Plaszow concentration camp to his wife Rebecca was an unforgettable scene in the movie Schindler’s List.
The film is based in large part on Bau’s memoir, Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry? (published in 1998). The film was written by Deborah Smerecnik, Ron Bass, and Sonia Kifferstein, and is directed by Sean McNamara.
Featuring stellar performances by Emile Hirsch (who appeared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) as the protagonist, and Inbar Lavi (who appeared in the Israeli television series Fauda and the U.S. television series Imposters) as Rebecca, the movie is a combination love story and espionage tale that deserves attention in an era, as one commentator has said, “where survivors are fading away, and the Holocaust is slipping from memory.” It’s also a story about resistance during the Holocaust.
In the movie, during his time in Plaszow Concentration Camp, Bau is a Jewish forger, an artist and a designer. He is employed by the brutal commandant Josef Liepold to draw a newly planned wing in the prison. He is simultaneously forging IDs for Jewish inmates helping them escape the prison. Hirsch as Bau, also draws comics for the prisoners, and his gift of art inspires his future wife with his colorful “lifegiving” creations, to which she responds in the gloomy setting of the death camp. McNamara cleverly intercuts these wonderful artworks within the film’s action.
Joseph Bau was a man who defied the darkness of the Holocaust with art, humor, and an unbreakable spirit. A gifted artist and master forger, Bau risked his life to save others, using his talent to create false documents that helped fellow prisoners escape certain death. But in the depths of despair, he discovered something even more powerful…love.
In the Plaszow concentration camp, amid relentless brutality, Joseph met Rebecca – a woman whose courage matched his own.
Years later, when Joseph is called to testify against the sadistic Nazi officer who tormented him, he is forced to relive the horrors of his past. But through it all, he draws strength from the love that saved him, the art that sustained him, and the unyielding will that kept him alive.
A gripping war drama, a daring espionage thriller, and one of the greatest love stories of our time, Bau, Artist at War is a testament to the power of resilience, the triumph of the human spirit, and the unbreakable bonds that even war could not destroy.
More stills from the movie:
